Hello Loves,
In the days before my accident, I was uncommonly aware of the sound of my feet walking.
I heard the rhythm of them as if the volume on my footsteps was turned to eleven. I heard my steps in the shoes I’d bought for my wedding as they clicked down the sidewalk as I rushed to a meeting. I heard my muffled steps in sturdy hiking shoes as I walked through fallen leaves on an esker trail in Cook County. I heard my steps on the twisty Dutch stairs in our old house.
The sound carried outside as it does in peak October in the Midwest—clear and bright and calm. The sound carried inside my house as it does in a place you love and maintain—cozy, comforting. Pay attention to how good this feels, I told myself, not knowing why, not knowing it would change so utterly in only a few days. Like a bird sensing a coming earthquake, my body understood before I did.
Now, after the fall that shattered my kneecap, I measure my days in footsteps. I look at my phone to see how many I’ve gotten. In September, writing days balanced with hiking days to average 5-6,000 steps a day. In November, I’ve averaged 68. As I’ve been on bedrest to protect my healing bone, my world has become the upper floor of my house, the bed, the bathroom, the room where we keep the television with the huge couch we bought in the pandemic as a place of solace and comfort for the three of us.
On Friday, after binging World Cup football all day, I began to panic about transferring from that couch back to my bed, a move that had become painful again, exhausting, after my attempt to leave the house for Thanksgiving.
I must have looked stricken. “You’re doing such a good job of this,” Andy said. “At this thing that is basically your kryptonite.”
It was late for me to be up, 11PM. As often happens when I stay up past my bedtime, I had all the emotional clarity of a sleepy toddler. I started crying about the way my body felt after a single trip of a few hours out of the house to eat with friends. Transferring my immobilized leg into the car had left new hip and back pain. Sitting at dinner had triggered fierce edema in the foot on my surgical leg. I was exhausted, facing setbacks, embarrassed that I’d risked pain just to have a moment of normalcy. I didn’t feel like I was doing a good job at all.
“My kryptonite?”
“Loss of control,” Andy said. “You hate resting. And your whole job right now is to rest, to heal. I can’t believe how careful you’re being. If it were me, I would have come apart a long time ago. You have none of your coping strategies available.”
“I can’t even walk in the woods,” I said, crying.
“Nope.”
I have never been a person who rests. I may preach it to others, especially my son, but in a life where illness hovered like a prediction of future stasis, I ran while I could, did while I could, hustled while I could.
It is not hard to have that kind of behavior validated in this country. It is not hard to have that kind of behavior validated as a mother. It is not hard to have that kind of behavior validated as a writer about ecocollapse. Here, in this precipitous moment, action, and lots of it, sometimes feels like the only answer.
As my body changed with kidney disease and the exercise routines of my 20s and 30s became difficult, I turned increasingly to the actions that my body and mind could handle. I kept my mind busy with twenty errands a day, care for an extended web of friends, parenting, projects, creative and otherwise like open tabs in my brain. I kept my body busy with walks in the woods and swims in the water.
My social media is full of the photographs of those trips. Every weekend through the pandemic, our family drove hours to Wisconsin to hike the Ice Age Trail, covering well over 300 of its 1,000+ miles since we began. We hiked in Illinois when the borders to other states were closed for Covid, in forest preserves and restored prairie, near bison and sandhill cranes, badgers and small April snakes, past pine groves and wetlands and restored prairie humming with insects. “I love your hiking reports,” a friend wrote to me after I posted pictures from one trip, “they get me through the week.”
They got me through the week, too, anchored me in my body even as my disease progressed, even when I was afraid of the fascist waves taking over the country where we walked.
“It is like hiking in Bavaria in the 30’s,” Andy said as we drove to a trailhead surrounded by farms with ten-foot-high banners for our former president.
They got me through all my research on compromised ocean systems, faltering trophic webs, disappearing fish. They gave me a sense of control, even if that control was only over my own body in space, or rather, my legs, my feet, the parts of me that felt the least compromised by my failing kidneys. In the forest, I felt the health of some systems of my body, some systems of the planet, as we both struggled to hold out for healing, for remedy, for hope.
In water, any water, I felt the same. I swam in public pools, rivers, hometown ponds, Lake Michigan, the Gulf of Maine. I was moving in a moving element, alive to what I could do more than what I couldn’t. The water lessened my pain. The buoyancy gave me new kinds of strength. I could travel farther and think less, my breathing, the freedom, became my only mantra. I saw what I could hold onto, not what I’d lost to the illness, not what the lake or ocean had lost. Only what we still had.
Action soothed the parts of me that wanted control as a child of alcoholics wants it, as a chronically ill person wants it, as proof of invulnerability to all that terrifies.
“Your only job right now is to heal,” Andy repeated.
I remembered the joke I was making to everyone who checked in on me over the last six weeks. “I’m a working dog,” I told them, “if you don’t give me occupation, I start to chew the furniture.”
And yet, here I am. I spend long days in bed. I live inside the stories I’m writing, where people hike and canoe and adventure, become spies or survivors. I needlepoint when I cannot write any longer or think any longer. I sleep with cats gently touching my surgical leg with healing paws.
I looked at Andy as we sat on the couch before the work of getting me to bed. I said, “I told Molly that I was learning new things while I’m healing. I’m learning to be cared for. No one ever did that for me, anyway, not like this, for weeks. And I’m learning to let go of control.”
“Your kryptonite.”
Day by day I’m learning the value of saying yes and please, and thank you, I’m grateful for you, and even for this. I’m learnign the value of accepting what I can’t change at all, at least until it does change, because it will.
In the midst of it all, there was good news, some I’m not ready to share, there was food and drink, my friends alive around a dinner table. There was pie. There was generosity of my community and my husband and son, chosen family and dear friends. All of it was worth the weepy toddler hour, the humbling, the chance to learn some more.
Maybe I will always be happier as a working dog. We have to meet our time on earth as who we are. But, when there are more lessons from my fragile body, I hope I learn them with the grace I’m attempting right now.
“My kryptonite indeed. Molly said, maybe I could have done without the broken knee in order to learn those things.”
“But you might not have.”
“I probably wouldn’t have.”
“No. But look at you—doing it now.”
I’ll write you soon,
Eiren
PS. If you want to support our family from a distance, I’ve started a fundraiser for our dear friend Lawrence Peters as he’s out of work. The GoFundMe is to help him ride out the limbo he’s in, and also to pay for his time as he helps us out with rides and chores until I’m cleared to drive. The money will also fund him helping another family with some similar challenges this winter. Anything that doesn’t pay for that time stays with Lawrence. Mutual aid is the key to so many things, and learning to rest is one of them.